


Humors of Wine

by haawk



Series: bitter work [1]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Canon-Typical Behavior, Drinking, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Pre-Relationship, i guess is what you'd call it?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-16
Updated: 2021-03-16
Packaged: 2021-03-25 01:02:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30081084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/haawk/pseuds/haawk
Summary: Wine, stargazing, and a (un)healthy heaping of bad memories.
Relationships: Robert Joseph MacCready & Sole Survivor, Robert Joseph MacCready/Female Sole Survivor, Robert Joseph MacCready/Sole Survivor
Series: bitter work [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2213253
Comments: 2
Kudos: 9





	Humors of Wine

**Author's Note:**

> tw for drinking/ alcoholism!

“Bitter.”

“What?” The suddenness made her laugh a little, maybe more than strictly necessary, but the wine flowing through her system made it easier to laugh. It made most things easier, she’d found.

“Your name. It means bitter.”

Mara turned her head towards him, the two of them laying on her roof. “Oh, yeah. I’ve heard that before.”

“It suits you.” MacCready was staring straight up at the stars. She still wasn’t used to seeing so many; too much light pollution, back when there were even lights to pollute. Sometimes it was hard to tell if things were better or worse.

Mara raised an eyebrow. “Oh? I’ve heard that before, too.”

MacCready finally turned his head to face her. She was pretty sure drinking made him sadder—made it harder to put up a tough-guy front and pretend like he’d never had to worry a day in his life. Drinking dulled her pain; made life feel a little more normal, like she was spending the night at a speakeasy with her friends, and not a shambling corpse resurrected 200 years past her prime.

They didn’t drink much.

“Mom picked it because it was pretty. Means ‘joy’ in one language. I think Oma was the first to realize it fit me for a different reason.” She paused for a moment. “Nominative determinism.” She didn’t know when Mara stopped being just a name and became a description. Maybe before, maybe after. Maybe it wasn’t until she stepped out of Vault 111, returning to the Promised Land without husband or child. Mara let out a dry laugh, more of a loud sigh, wondering if there was a Bible left in the entire Commonwealth.

MacCready had been watching her while she spoke, looking as peaceful as she’d ever seen him. Maybe peaceful wasn’t the right word. Patient—that was it. He shrugged (as much as he could with his hands under his head) and said, “Some people’s names don’t fit. You’re lucky. Mine is fu—ugh, is stupid.”

Mara tried to think if she knew his first name. She was sure she could come up with it if she hadn’t drunk so much. It was so easy to drink too much. “What does your name mean? ‘Asshole’?”

He didn’t scoff at her like he normally did, just pursed his lips a little. “Well, Robert is Proto-Germanic.”—he over-enunciated every syllable, sure to get it right—"It means 'glory’ and ‘bright.’ And Joseph is ‘He will add,’ in Hebrew. Hey, same language as Mara.”

Mara stared at him, eyebrows raised. “Where’d you learn that?”

“We had a lot of books. Really old ones, usually. And stuff people were left with, like notes from their families. We pieced it together.” He turned his head back to the sky. “I used to carry around a piece of paper with their meanings on it, as if they would come true just from wishing.”

“You must’ve had good books. Not many people seem to care about learning anymore.” She snorted, “Not that they cared about education before the war, either.”

MacCready closed his eyes. “Most people are just trying to survive.”

They were quiet for a bit. The two of them were good at being quiet. Everyone else liked to talk, or chatter mindlessly, or even just stomp around loud enough to hear blocks away. Even Deacon, self-designated ‘stealth expert,’ could go on and on. Usually, Mara liked it. She didn’t have to hear herself think that way, the same way she didn’t hear anything when she was drunk. She was getting good at being drunk, in a way that would’ve scared the shit out of Nate, but now only made her heart thud painfully when she didn’t recognize herself in the mirror. Nate would’ve been able to make it out here without turning to something to numb the pain. Mara was pretty sure she was turning into her Opa.

Eventually, she couldn’t take the silence anymore, even though she thought MacCready was already asleep. “So, you wished on a scrap of paper. What makes you so sure it hasn’t worked?”

He huffed. She could picture him rolling his eyes. “I would know.”

“Just like that?”

“Yep.” He might’ve sounded terse, but Mara knew she was the only one who could get away with pushing his buttons. MacCready had never been mad at her before, not even that time she dropped her 10mm and the resulting fire had narrowly missed his foot.

“Have you tried wishing on stars?”

He looked back at her, a small smile playing on his lips. “On stars, huh? How’s that work?”

Mara sat up, pulling her legs up to her chest, watching the lights of Sanctuary. “It’s all very simple really. Stars are actually signs from the gods, and carry their blessings. If the stars are in the right order or the right constellations are out, good fortune is coming your way.” She looked back at him, grinning.

MacCready propped himself up on an elbow, an amused tone to his voice, “ _Riiight_ , the gods. ‘Scuse me for doubting their power. Which constellations would you recommend, since you know so much about it?”

“I don’t know any,” she shrugged.

He gave her an unimpressed look, laying back down to study the sky again. “I choose those. That’s my constellation.” He pointed to a clump of stars. Mara squinted. She might’ve not known anything about astronomy or star patterns, but she was fairly certain that his stars didn’t actually make anything. She opened her mouth to tell him, but saw that he looked pretty pleased for once—as pleased as RJ MacCready got, anyway—so she just laid down, too.

“I want that big one.” She pointed her star out as well; red around the edges, if you looked at it sideways.

“What’s your wish?”

“If you tell what your wish is, it won’t come true.” They were quiet again, MacCready seeming to accept that as an answer. One thing about drinking—Mara couldn’t keep her mouth shut. Another reason she usually only drank around MacCready, which meant she rarely drank. “I wished that I would wake up and this would all be a bad dream. Or that before never happened, and this is how it always was.”

She saw MacCready turn toward her out of the corner of her eye, but she stared resolutely straight. No one had seen her break down before (well, besides Doctor Amari, but who would she tell?), and she wasn’t _about_ to let anyone see it. Keeping her voice steady—she was getting good at that, too—she asked, “What about you?”

MacCready frowned. “I just kept the wish about my name, but it feels kind of shi—dumb now.”

Mara laughed, but she could feel her eyes burn and the tears stream down her face anyway. Usually drinking stopped this from happening. If MacCready could see the tears on her face or hear her sniffling, he didn’t say anything. He just reached out across the distance between them, and offered his hand. She grabbed it, squeezing hard. Just the two of them and the stars, back to being quiet.

**Author's Note:**

> i've wanted to write mara for so long because i really love her character (can you say that about ocs?), but i never knew how i wanted to do it until about 2 am last night. mara was one of my first video game characters that wasn't just a self-insert with no backstory
> 
> why does rj know about name meanings? short answer: i do what i want. long answer, i have to imagine that books are scarce and probably somewhat precious, so little lamplight just grabbed whatever they could until they had the most random assortment possible. yeah maccready can be a little shit, but he's pretty sentimental and i just think he would like having those connections.
> 
> also re: title; like humors of whiskey? get it?


End file.
